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The Marram Grass:
Poetry and Otherness
by Anne Simpson
Kentville, NS: Gaspereau
Press, 2009, ISBN 978-1-544707-16, $26.95 paper.
The Marram Grass begins with a precise and lyrical description of a walk that Anne Simpson regularly takes with her dogs. She describes the appearance of the land in all seasons and describes the wildlife she discovers there, including a barred owl that seems to stare through the boundaries of skin and bone into her soul. The subject of boundaries and their permeability reverberates through the six essays that follow, and images of nature, such as the owl, mirror and embody the experiences of mutual recognition and interconnectedness that Simpson sees as the gift of art.Because Simpson begins with a walk, and because the walk is such a common trope in the personal essay, we could be forgiven for expecting to find personal essays in this book. But as the shoreline merges with the sea, so, in The Marram Grass, the personal elides into the philosophical. Simpson may begin with the quotidian, but within three pages, she is quoting Merleau-Ponty, and by the tenth page, she has also mentioned Descartes, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Richard Rorty and Paul Celan by way of Thoreau. Later, she will yoke together thinkers as diverse as Emmanuel Levinas, Edith Stein, and the Dalai Lama. A style as dense with reference as this one takes some time to get used to. But the essays reward the rereading they may require, because they're the work of an artist who has thought long and deeply about the meaning of her practice.
According to Simpson, a paradox of poetry is that it is "language at its most vibrant and dense [but] also . . . language on its way to silence." (30) Language and silence, rather than language or silence. Both/and rather than either/or. Not only does poetry exemplify this paradox; it also instructs us in the capacity to accept paradox and the unresolved more generally. This capacity--Keats called it negative capability--permits us to hover back and forth between any pair of seeming binaries, such as absence and presence, making and unmaking, giving and taking, self and other. Empathy is the name we give to this movement of the intellect and spirit.
The idea that art tutors us in empathy is not a new one. Yet, while it is relatively easy to imagine ourselves as the other when the other is sympathetic, it is much more difficult to see ourselves reflected in the faces of those we consider evil or frightening or just plain wrong. Thus, when Simpson indicates her feelings for the family of a boy lost to suicide or for a child prostitute, her empathy seems no more (and no less) than conventional. But when she imagines her own face staring back from the face of a man who is determined to appropriate hundreds of hectares of her beloved shoreline for an environmentally risky project, she demonstrates a deeper and more unusual kind of empathy. This example, taken from "The Dark Side of Fiction's Moon," a haunting essay about the doppelgänger, lends credence to the idea that empathy can be strengthened and refined by the experience and practice of art.
At first, I shifted awkwardly between the concrete, descriptive parts of these essays and the more abstract and analytical sections, and I questioned the wisdom of juxtaposing the two. But as I read further, I came to understand that Simpson's descriptions of nature aren't merely decorative; instead, they serve to advance her arguments about the ways that art apprehends and constructs otherness and about the role of metaphor in this process. For Simpson, nature and the wild are perhaps unique in that most of us can readily recognize them as both inner and other. Thus, nature offers unparallelled expressions and experiences of the kind of give-and-take and empathic interpenetration that art can also engender. Similarly, the trope of the walk, repeated in many of the essays, reflects the connection between movement and understanding that Simpson explicates in the more philosophical and analytical passages. Meanwhile, the structural device of juxtaposition does more than mirror a back-and-forth movement of thought; it also invites us to participate in this motion. Disparate though they may seem, both sides of these essays--the personal and the philosophical--enlarge and illuminate the other, just as they enlarge and illuminate the central premise of the book.
The essays in The Marram Grass are accompanied by simple line drawings that underscore and elaborate Simpson's arguments. A line drawing of footprints in snow beautifully illustrates the Buddhist idea, raised later in the book, that absence is presence and presence is absence (37). A drawing of snow on trees (where the snow is implied by white space) shows, rather than merely states, that form illuminates emptiness and emptiness illuminates form (48). Drawings of the view from or through windows emphasize the role of perspective-taking (32, 114, 122), and a drawing of the soft rock shoreline at Monk's Head suggests how land partakes of water and water partakes of land--and, by extension, how each of us partakes of the others. (135).
Gaspereau produces beautiful books and this is no exception. Midnight blue, with silver lettering and one of Simpson's shore drawings printed in black, the cover hints at the depths and highlights within, while the richly textured paper complements the layering of thought.
Marram grass spreads through a sort of underground web of its own devising. In a similar fashion, the essays in this book reach out, take hold, and endure.
Susan Olding studied philosophy but a rather long time ago.
Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.